Monica Potts

Recent Articles

B eing poor is expensive. A winter heating bill that comes due before the paycheck arrives can compel a trip to a payday lender who charges 350 percent interest. It takes the entire paycheck to pay off that loan in a week—emptying out the bank account and requiring yet another visit to the lender. A child who is too sick to go to school for a week may need her single father to stay home with her, costing him a quarter of his monthly income. He’s overdue on the rent and the bills, so he’s responsible for late fees as well. Even a few hundred dollars in a savings account could help low-income families weather such predictable but unavoidable crises—provided they have extra money to save. Their budgets are tight, and saving makes sense only if they’re not sacrificing food or child care in order to put money aside. Anti-poverty advocates have long known there could be a relatively cheap, simple way to help people avoid such trade-offs if the government structured savings plans tailored to...

Update: Governor Jan Brewer has ordered state officials to redirect $650,000 in state funds so that families continue to receive welfare benefits. W hen Congress shut down the government, one of the many programs caught up in the fracas was Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF), the program created by the 1996 welfare-reform law. Spending on the program is mandatory, and normally wouldn’t be a casualty of an appropriations fight like the one waged now. But the law officially expired three years ago. Instead of taking it up again, Congress has simply extended the last reauthorization with each new spending bill. No spending bill, no welfare program. The biggest way the ’96 reform law changed the program was by turning it into a block grant to states: Whatever the federal government appropriated for programs designed to help poor families, they would send it in chunks to state governments that were fairly free to decide how to spend it. TANF continues to provide cash benefits to some...

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor L ast week, House Republicans passed a bill that would cut the food stamp program by about $40 billion over the next ten years. They’re drawing on headline numbers—the program serves about 47 million people each year and has the biggest price tag of any program in the farm bill, $80 billion—to drum up support. The aid, technically known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is still known as food stamps to nearly everyone who receives it. There’s little chance that the bill will be enacted, given the more moderate makeup of the Senate, although it’s likely that some cuts will end up on the president’s desk. (The Senate is cutting $4.4 billion from the program.) Still, food stamps are one of the most robust federal entitlements for the poor we have left, so it’s always going to be a target for cuts. It’s worth looking beyond those bold-face numbers in the news to see how the program is performing—and why it’s...

When the House voted yesterday to cut $40 billion from the food-stamp program, they doubled the cuts the House had previously considered. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 3.8 million people will be taken off the program, primarily because the House is removing some of the flexibility states have to meet the needs of their communities. They are restoring strict federal rules to the program. That’s an odd move for a bunch of Republicans. Most of the people who will be removed from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s (SNAP) rolls are adults in high unemployment areas who don’t have children and can’t find jobs, and families with gross incomes that are slightly higher than the poverty line, but whose disposable incomes fall below it. These changes were introduced a few years ago to meet a rising need. The poverty line is low, and doesn’t take into account how much families spend on the costs of necessities like housing and childcare. More than half of all food...

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky T hough we’ve technically been recovering from the Great Recession since late 2009, the poverty rate in the United States has been stuck at about 15 percent since 2010. New data released yesterday from the Census Bureau showed that last year wasn’t much better. Poverty rates held steady at the highest levels in a generation. Median incomes have fallen in the last ten years by more than 11 percent. Coupled with recent studies showing that most of the recovery’s gains have gone to the top 1 percent of income earners, the data on poverty confirms what many already knew: Inequality is growing, and the middle class is dying. That’s especially true when you examine the status of women and racial minorities. The median incomes for Asian and white families last year were $68,636 and $57,009 respectively. For Hispanics and blacks, they were $39,005 and $33,321. These incomes are statistically unchanged from 2011, which means that if the economy is growing, the average...